Seeing and Being Seen

This chapter introduces the modern strategies that Medardo Rosso developed to reach an audience during his Parisian years. He worked mostly on a small scale and cast in his studio rather than having his sculptures cast by commercial foundries. He also began to exploit the new middle-class taste for cheaper sculptural materials, casting works in wax and plaster and selling them as finished pieces. He capitalized on his experience in Italian foundries, where the cire perdue (lost wax) method was regularly employed for casting bronzes, to generate special excitement around his sculptures. Rosso attempted to personalize his relationship with buyers and circumvent the Parisian gallery system that was becoming the intermediary between avant-garde art and a new bourgeois audience.